In the following section I want to describe how you can build your own planetarium using stellariums spheric_mirror distortion feature.

What you need:

A dome. The dome should have a spherical inside. I suppose you can have good results with any dome larger than 2m in diameter, perhaps even with smaller ones.

A spherical security mirror. I recomment a 1/4 mirror, thats a quarter of a sphere. Something like 0.4 or 0.5m in diameter should be ok, for small domes you may need smaller mirrors, decide for yourself.

A video projector

A computer running a current verion of stellarium.

In the following example I assume a dome with 5m diameter and a spheric 1/4 mirror with radius 0.25m.
I suggest the following config.ini settings:

You should be familiar with the keys because there will be no menu exept the tui. When you start stellarium press "PgDown" to get maximum FOV and "CursorUp" in order to look at the zenith. Press "z" 2 times in order to display the azimuth grid. Press "1" in order to get the config window. In the video settings choose the spheric_mirror distortion.

Install the spheric mirror inside the dome. Imagine a coordinate system that is centered in the dome center. The z-axis points upward to the zenith and the y-axis points to some point on the horizon. Look into the direction of the y-axis. Now the x-axis points to a point on the horizon which is near your right hand. In the above config.ini example I suggest that the center of the spheric mirror is at (0,2,0) (I use meters, but feel free to
use any units you like).

Install the projector approximately at (0,1,-0.2). Notice the z-coordinate -0.2: the projector is lower than the spheric mirror center so that it shall not occult parts of the image. In my implementation I assume that all light comes from one point, which in reality is not true. The projector_position in config.ini refers to this fictional point. It will lie somewhere inside your projector, I do not know, where.

Turn your projector on and project the image onto the mirror. The upper black curved border of the image should correspond to the upper part of the mirror. Use the projector zoom and the scaling_factor in order to match. Also shift and tilt your projector so that the image zenith and horizon is projected onto your dome zenith and horizon. The azimuth grid should be in place, you know what I mean. Play around with the geometry parameters. In order to get equal illumination throughout the dome, you must set the projector_gamma value to whatever your projector needs.

I keep getting inquiries about zenith_y, so here comes a short explanation.
The optical axis of the projector does not go through the center of the mirror sphere, but it meets the mirror surface on some point in the upper half. With the zenith_y parameter you can configure, where this point is. With zenith_y=0 the zenith is right in the center of the stellarium window (y=0). With zenith_y>0 the zenith is above the center of the stellarium window, with zenith_y<0 the zenith is below the center of the stellarium window.
There is no zenith_x parameter for moving the zenith to the left of right side of the stellarium window.
Exercise: try zenith_y values of 0.0,0.3,-0.3.

You do not need to restart stellarium every time you make changes to the spheric mirror distortion parameters. While stellarium is running just change the parameters in config.ini with your favourite editor, and in the stellarium config window switch to a different projection type, and back to spheric mirror distortion.

Mr. Paul Bourke has explained to me that some users like the following setup: They configure their dual head graphic card to show the same image on both outputs. One of them is connected to the projector, the other to an ordinary monitor that is used by the operator only. The operator wants to read the texts left-to-right, and therefore there shall be no image flipping on the stellarium image. Of course the projector then must be capable of doing image flipping, and must be configured to do so. Therefore I have introduced two new config.ini options in the [spheric_mirror] section: flip_horz (default=true) and flip_vert (default=false). This feature is available in current svn, and will go into the 0.9.x release.

Mr. Paul Bourke was so nice to set up an own page describing in great detail how to setup stellariums spheric mirror distortion feature, please visit his page at: